Friday, May 19, 2017

Microsoft Video Indexer

One of the recent announcements from Microsoft was their new Video Indexer which is in preview. Basically it allows you to upload a video and then it do transcriptions as well as cognitive analysis on things like the sentiment.

Cool, so I thought I’d give it a go. So I uploaded a recent video which you view above or here:

If you then select Transcript in the upper right you’ll see the raw transcription it made like so:

As the video plays you’ll see the window on the right scroll through text.

Obviously, once the transcript has been created you can search that which I have done in the above screen shot.

Now if you mouse over the video and select the Closed Captioning option you’ll be able to enable captioning like so:

Pretty cool eh? Considering all I did was just upload the video.

Now obviously, it is not going to get all of it exactly right but you can go in, as shown above, and edit the created transcript along with other part of the video and even create your own breakdowns.

If you select a highlighted Keyword on the right the video will jump to the first instance of that. Press it again and it will jump to the second instance. Again, really, really cool. That’s the power of cognitive services in Azure for you.

I’ll need to play with this more but I certainly hope they bring all these features to Office 365 Video. How powerful will that be for creating training and on-boarding videos?

Go and have a play with the video I posted and let me know what you think.